Which Lead Source Actually Makes You Money? Most Dealers Are Guessing

The number almost no dealer can answer

Ask a dealer their cost per lead and most can tell you. Ask their cost per *sale*, broken down by source, and the room goes quiet. That second number is the one that decides whether a channel is making you money or burning it.

Third-party portals aren't cheap. Industry data puts TrueCar around $250 to $400 a lead, Edmunds near $150 to $200, and other portals in the $90 to $140 range. By comparison, a lead from your own website or Google search can run closer to $40. On cost per lead alone, owned channels already look better — but cost per lead isn't the point.

Cost per lead is a vanity metric

What matters is what closes. And close rates vary wildly by source: a showroom up closes around 25%, a phone lead around 14%, and a typical internet lead closes at roughly 6% (the better-run BDCs push that to 10–15%).

Run the math and the "cheap" lead can be the expensive one. A $200 portal lead that closes at 6% costs you over $3,300 per sale. A $40 website lead that closes at 12% costs about $330 per sale. Same shopper, very different economics — and you only see it if you track outcome, not just volume.

The cheapest leads that don't close are the most expensive leads you buy.

The $18,000 question

Here's how it adds up. A dealer leaning 80% on third-party portals, at a realistic effective cost of around $225 per lead, can spend roughly $18,000 a month on 80 leads. Shift even half of that volume to owned channels (your site, your search, your past customers) and the bill drops sharply, while the leads that remain tend to close at a higher rate.

That's not an argument to fire your portals. It's an argument to know which ones actually produce sales, so you can spend more where it works and less where it doesn't.

What to actually track

If you want to stop guessing, four numbers per source tell the whole story:

1. Cost per lead — what you pay to get the inquiry
2. Close rate — how many of those inquiries become sales
3. Cost per sale — the one that actually matters
4. Front-end gross per sale — because a cheap sale at thin margin isn't a win either

Most dealers have the first number and none of the rest. The reason is simple: the spend lives in one system and the outcome lives in another, and nobody connects them.

That's the gap Carvio closes — every lead is tied to its source and to what happened next, so you can see which channels turn into deals instead of just submissions. Book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like on real numbers.